This entry was posted using Chromium as packaged for Debian. Thus far, Chromium has been much, much nicer than Chrome, mainly because Chrome ignores my fontconfig settings (which specify Linux Libertine serif fonts everywhere), while Chromium obeys them. I even have hope that I can make the ^A and ^E text edit keys work right. After that, maybe getting it to render standard ligatures (such as "ffi", "Qu", and "Th", and on my system, "st" and "ct") might even be possible. Firefox does it.

As far as I have been able to determine, Intel Arrandale support (needed for the Dell Latitude e6510 with 1920x1080 display) in the drm-intel-next branch off 2.6.38-rc7 is now fully functional, including suspend/resume, gnome-display-properties, XVideo, GL, and DPMS blanking. Apparently it's all expected to end up in 2.6.39, none too soon. Maybe Sandy Bridge support will be a little more timely. I'm guessing that the reason it's so hard is that the win32 driver writers were able to pester the hardware people when the docs were ambiguous, but by the time the Linux drivers are to be written, they've all moved on to other projects, and anyway can't remember what-all bugs their design shipped with.

I was almost won over by Apenwarr's encomium for Etherpad, and I asked about getting it installed at work to use instead of Google Docs, which is getting increasingly hard to tolerate. Unfortunately, it appears to be implemented in Java and Scala, which (for very good and sound reasons!) they would prefer not to put on their nice clean, well-functioning servers. So, now I'm looking for an Etherpad workalike written in something reasonable, e.g. C++. Then LWN spills the beans on something called "Fossil", an integrated bug-tracker, wiki, and distributed version control system, and I start to think I need that too. But maybe what I really need is a fork of Fossil with an Etherpaddy wiki, a Traccy bug tracker, and a Git back end. In the meantime, I struggle with Review Board's intolerance of Git diffs. Apparently you have to pipe
Git's diff output through

Speaking of Avery, I'm mystified why he thinks rigorously defensible parsing of arithmetic expressions is somehow difficult or messy. Just about every yacc or recursive-descent example I've ever seen included a clean and complete arithmetic parser, with nice term-and-factor precedence handling. What am I missing? Am I improperly presuming sanity?

The most tasteless joke I heard all week was, "Oh, the
Japanese are used to radiation poisoning." I'm not certain
it was meant as a joke. Anyway, it's wrong: Americans have
a lot more experience with with radiation and radionuclide
contamination than the Japanese. The difference is that we
did it to ourselves. Or, depending on your viewpoint, the
U.S. military-industrial complex did it to us. ("Americans",
here, includes Canadians and Mexicans.) Estimates are that
more than a million more Americans died horribly of cancer
than would have without above-ground testing. The people
responsible were never prosecuted.

Graydon informs me that the feature I needed in Firefox
is
implemented as an extension, "BarTab".

I have discovered that I can get enormously better-looking
monospace terminal fonts (Inconsolata, of course) by
frobnicating the dots/inch setting in gnome-appearance-
properties/fonts/details. My actual monitor is
1920/20.5=93.66 dots/inch, but gnome-terminal and roxterm
look best if I set it to 103 dots/inch.

There's only one browser feature that I am certain would
notably improve my own life. That would be a mode to
restore a session without actually loading the content of
all the pages, toasting the network, and demanding passwords
all over the place. Just display whatever is cached, and
leave the rest of the tabs blank until I ask to refresh
them. As it is, I have to "route del default", and then
restore, and then "route add default gw 10.0.xx.xx" after
the browser settles down. It's a really clunky way to go
about things. (If displaying cached content would be tricky,
then just leave them all blank.)

After giving the matter deep and thorough consideration, I
can, with utter confidence, recommend against kidney stones.
No,
sir, I didn't like it. You know how people are
always
telling you that you need to drink an unreasonable amount of
water
every day? It turns out that's so you won't get kidney
stones.
Women who have had them say it's the closest a man can
experience to
the pain of childbirth. It impressed me. Oddly, the
symptoms
didn't at all match what the books said about kidney stones,
but the
nurses and doctors all instantly pegged it. The pain wasn't
in my
back, but seemed to be in my colon. Apparently all those
prostaglandins
sloshing about inflame everything nearby. I can also say
that hydrocodone (Vicodin) works very, very well on kidney
stone pain.

Has everybody else noticed that Google Maps doesn't work
as well as once did? Often, lately, it
leaves tiles unfilled. But it seems better than it was a
couple of months ago.

I never had any real doubts about whether the new Systemd
replacement for init.d and Upstart was
a good idea. Certainly, the architectural justification for
its design seemed sound. Then, I saw on
Linux Weekly News that it cannot function if your
partitioning isn't just so. In
particular, it seems, you'd better not have
/usr mounted on / from another drive or
partition. Yes, really. Now, on most of my machines
/usr isn't mounted, so that doesn't
affect me directly, but such choices drain confidence.
(That, and PulseAudio still doesn't work right.) It makes
me wonder what other crazy bits are in there.

I've finally taken up Git. I know I'm late to the party,
but I can already say without fear of contradiction that the
correct solution to every problem, difficult or trivial,
begins with creating one or more branches, in much the same
way that every cake recipe begins with washing your hands
and preheating the oven. If you're not creating an
improbable
number of branches, you must be doing it wrong.

The weird failures on Intel i5 ("Arrandale") display
hardware, on laptops, continue. Apparently the fixes aren't
expected to make it into mainline linux until 2.6.39. The
kernels in drm-intel-next have been getting worse, so I'm
still on a snapshot based on 2.6.37-rc8.

Once again, I have remedied the entire lack of audio
functionality on a Linux box by purging all the
Pulseaudio-related packages, and /etc/asound.conf. While my
respect for Lennart is second to none's, my success rate
with PA has thus far been zero vs. a remarkably large N. I
am finding it hard to blame myself for that, in the wake of
my recent success finally getting the Intel Arrandale
graphics subsystem on my laptop working.

Thanks (again) to the many who have expressed sympathy
for my health
problem. I guess I wasn't clear enough,
though: my memory problem has been solved with
medication. It has side effects -- loud ringing,
jaw clenching at night, waking at 5 AM, and "dry mouth"
-- all manageable. I'd like to reduce my dosage, but
dare not without objective testing to determine whether
the symptoms have begun to return.

It's interesting to explore how complicated
short-term
memory failure can be. I didn't have any trouble
remembering what I had read, or seen, or done. What
caused the most difficulty was loss of what might be
termed intentional memory, the register of planned
future actions. Everybody forgets, sometimes, what
we went into the next room to fetch, but we remember
that we had meant to fetch something. I didn't.
Not always, but the stack overflowed much more easily.
Similarly, I could remember three digits, but add
three more and any of them might be scrambled.

* * *

My brother tells me Android jumped the shark in their 2.2
release. Now you need 500M of RAM just to run a minimal
system. He blames the proliferation of background tasks
that can't be turned off, and that insist on running even
when they have no work to do, coupled with
garbage-collection. He says the machine spends all its time
oom-killing and garbage-collecting background tasks, and
then restarting them and killing others, so it can't
even keep up scrolling with his finger. Apple may have been
right to restrict background tasks on the iPhone, but the
undisciplined memory habits endemic to Java coding make it
deserve most of the blame.

It has been a calmly terrifying last few months. I found I
couldn't program any more. When I tried, I would just get
sleepy. I left work on medical disability insurance. The
mental health people really had no idea what to do, so they
just tried different chemicals. Of course they started by
diagnosing ADHD and prescribed amphetamines, which were a
disaster. As it turned out, my problem was a curiously
failing short-term memory. Oddly, it didn't interfere at
all with reading, cooking, driving, or grocery shopping. I
was just lucky they found, more or less by accident,
something that helped. Neurologists have objective tests
that would have narrowed the problem, but Kaiser wouldn't
let me see any of their neurologists. Hints that it was a
memory problem were that I could never remember how I came
to be web-surfing instead of coding, and that I couldn't
remember an IP address long enough to type it in, or a phone
number long enough to dial it.

A few weeks back my wife and kids abandoned Google Chrome,
which they used to like, as too buggy, and have gone back to
Firefox. The latest version might be better.

My kids and I have been enjoying Osmos ($10). My son has
been enjoying Algodoo (~$30), and Numptyphysics (Free), 2D
physics simulations. He got a "Spy Trakr" for Christmas, a
sort of remote-control tractor with a camera, microphone and
speaker, and a little color display on the remote control.
What I didn't know at first was that they have a free SDK
for it, an ARM Gcc toolchain.

When my mother-in-law's Shuttle went on the blink, I
replaced it ($85, Craigslist) and switched her from Ubuntu
Edgy to Debian Squeeze, Firefox 2 to Iceweasel 3. She's
happier now.

I've installed Squeeze candidates twice. Both times, I tried
to install it from a USB thumb drive. Both times, the BIOS
insisted it could boot from USB, but did not recognize the
Debian boot image as something to boot from. Both times, I
ended up burning a CD. Both times, the installer ignored
the packages on the CD, and instead demanded a network
connection, and installed everything from a mirror.

Today was the day to remember the United States has
announced itself cowards before all the world. Will we ever
regain our pride? Not until the last torturing murderer
protected by the Pentagon is in chains.

Who says sociology doesn't have anything useful to offer?
This paper, L-worlds:
The curious preference for low quality and its
norms, by
Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi, explains so much about so
much that the world will never look the same. It explains
why offering good free software to people used to expensive
bad software just irritates them. It explains why
well-reasoned discussion isn't welcome in blog comments. It
explains Safeway supermarkets, American cars, and
television.

I'm still trying to get this Dell E6510 with
integratedIntel Arrandale graphics working. Lately it's been
overheating, although I don't know whether to blame linux or
Dell. During a long kernel build, it hovers around 101C
(spiking over 105, with emergency shutdown) in an X
terminal, but around only 75 C without X. Starting a
compile jumps the temperature by 18K in a couple of seconds,
and stopping drops it by 20K in about the same time.

More mysteriously, the Synaptics touchpad doesn't show up
as anything but a PS/2 mouse, so edge scrolling etc. doesn't
work. Lots of workarounds are offered all over the web, but
none of them help.